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When the dance shop went out of business, Marver decided to jump in, stocking his store with wigs, costumes, and masks the following fall. “People would be lined up two, three blocks down the street,” he says. Every October, Marver noticed the crowds that would descend on the dance shop across the street, which stocked Halloween costumes. In the early 1980s, long before Amazon warehouses and big-box stores came to dominate the suburban landscape, most people did their shopping at malls and small shopping centers - like the one where Joe Marver had a women’s clothing store, Spirit Women’s Discount Apparel, in Castro Valley, California. It took a while to pinpoint the mood, so foreign did it feel after a year of tense grocery-store visits and dreary Amazon searches: People were having fun. Shoppers were laughing and jumping back in mock horror from the elaborate animatronic displays of hatchet-wielding clowns. There were families, couples, young men, old women, and college students in crop tops.
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An older man in a KN95 mask pawed through Halloween T-shirts, a woman pushed a stroller piled high with decorations, and two employees scanned racks looking for child-size mummy costumes.
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The section of the floor used by Spirit Halloween, by contrast, was packed and lively. At the center of the space, you could see, behind the black metal display racks and a scrim of some kind, the expensive remnants of its predecessor - the signature spiral staircase, lots of polished white marble and white lights, all of it coldly celestial. There are, of course, supply-chain issues and worker shortages - and fans report empty shelves at some Spirit stores - but a few days ago, the Spirit in the former Barneys was fully stocked and had what seemed like an excessive number of employees milling about. Halloween spending is projected to climb to $10 billion in 2021, up $2 billion from last year, according to the National Retail Federation, and Spirit Halloween is by far the biggest Halloween retailer. Spirit is the joke, and Spirit is in on the joke. Last year comedian Nick Lutsko made a mock theme song for Spirit Halloween that went viral (“Jeff Bezos murdered Barnes & Noble, Jeff Bezos murdered Sears, Jeff Bezos murdered Toys ‘R’ Us, but Spirit Halloween is here.”) Spirit responded by sending Lutsko some money and commissioning more theme songs. It has even served as a pro-labor symbol. The artist Danielle Baskin printed a banner and unfurled it in front of Google’s San Francisco offices as a commentary on empty tech campuses. The orange Spirit Halloween banner is now so ubiquitous it has become a meme synonymous with impending doom and reuse, Photoshopped over the White House and the Facebook sign. The list of sites on the company website reads like an obituary section: the former Barneys, the former J&R Music, the former Topshop, and former Men’s Warehouses, Toys “R” Uses, and Planet Fitnesses. In New York City, there are more than ten Spirits. This year, the company opened 1,410 seasonal stores - more than ever - and thanks to the retail apocalypse, it had its pick of locations. In a retail landscape littered with death and haunted by the specter of Amazon, Spirit Halloween has thrived. The sight was jarring but not actually surprising. A space that had once been occupied by the most sophisticated department store on earth, a place known for being avant-garde (Andy Warhol shopped there) and extremely expensive, would soon be selling polyester Cleopatra costumes, Michael Myers masks, and six-foot-tall animatronic killer clowns. Then, in August, a literal Grim Reaper logo appeared in the window, a sign not of death but (after a fashion) retail resurrection: Spirit Halloween was moving in. For a year and a half after the death of Barneys, the fabled department store’s Seventh Avenue location sat empty, spooking passersby who remembered its glory days and its gruesome demise.